What Shade the Stone: Some Late Night Thoughts on Color and Curation in Archaeology

The Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology and History of the Early Americas became part of the Geography and Map Division several years ago and contains Pre-Columbian archaeological objects, maps, like Waldseemüller’s famous 1516 Carta Marina, and manuscripts and rare books relating to the earliest history of America. The dates of the collection span a wide range from 1100 BC until the mid-18th century. Part of collection is on permanent rotating display in the Exploring the Early Americas Exhibit in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library, with the remainder of the objects housed in the recently opened Kislak Study Collection in the vaults of the Geography and Map Division. There they may be studied by scholars by contacting the collection curator John Hessler ([email protected]).

This post is part of an occasional series that will feature new research, thoughts on the curation and imaging of archaeological objects, and highlights of objects from the Kislak collection.

Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color. –Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color

Goethe’s theory of the origin of the spectrum isn’t a theory of its origin that has proved unsatisfactory; it is really not a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted by means of it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline […]. There is no experimentum crucis for Goethe’s theory of colour. –Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color

Last week I was in London doing research at the British Museum’s offsite storage facility, located at Blyth House, working on plaster casts of some of the most important Maya epigraphy to have survived from the Classic Period (600-900 CE). These casts, which were produced by the archaeologist and photographer Alfred Maudslay at the end of the nineteenth century, represented, in many ways, the state-of the-art in archaeological reproduction and imaging at the time. Drawings made of the inscriptions, so accurately recorded in low-relief on the these fragile plaster surfaces, by the artist Anne Hunter, helped pave the way for the later twentieth century decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphic writing.

Author examining hieroglyphic casts at Blyth House in London. Photograph by Jago Cooper, Curator, British Museum. — Author examining hieroglyphic casts at Blyth House in London. Photograph by Dr. Jago Cooper, Curator of the Americas at the British Museum, London.

The experience of seeing the casts in person and looking at some of the sketches made by Hunter started me thinking about what must have been one of most perplexing tasks of past archaeological curation, namely, the difficulties in illustrating and reproducing archaeological objects in a way that would accurately reflect the originals so as to make them more readily available and useful to scholars.